About Me

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Email From 11/11

Well hello everyone,

First full real week here in Zarumilla, and what an experience it was... first off dad and mom will you please as soon as you read this send my white pants back and the belt. im sorry for the rush and thank you in advance... well i have my new address for all who wish to write and send letters..

is you want to send a package you need to put the name " Elder Rober Swasy" before mine on the box or whatever it is...also if you send a dear elder i get them the following week on monday. dad i got your from the 25th today..and i cant send the memory card home because they will get stolen during customs so im printing pictures to send...sorry

Well thats all that now to the good stuff haha this week was an interesting week. we have a lot of investigators who are progressing and a lot who are really struggling and it kills us.. Hernando is 47 and he is really doing well, he attends church every sunday and calls himself mormon but he would never accept a baptism date and no one could figure out why, we spent an entire lesson bearing our testimonies to him and reassuring him that we are here not to judge but support. he finally admitted to a grave sin that will require a trip to piura this week for an interveiw with presidnet chipman ...a 5 hour bus trip one way ... but we have high hopes for him and we know the lord will provide a way for him..the big thing here to avoid taxes is to not get married but to just live together and call eachother wife or husband and this causes a big problem for us because is they are sexually involved we must first get them married so that they can be living the law of chastity before they can get baptised we are working with 3 families in this situation and working hard and doing our best to get them married haha, ive heard almost every doubt why not to get married since being here! fun stuff haha, one ion particular is Monica. she is 16 and living with and dateing the bishops son, we are working on them getting married this week so she can be baptised on the 20th!!! haha we have 8 investigators with dates but peruvians are easy to make committments and a lot harder to keep them so we are always praying haha if your knees on your pants arent the most torn dirty and mangled part of your pants you arent praying enough here! well one fun experience that happened this week was that i got robbed by a drunk, quite the adventure.. we were at the door of a member who is a preist in the ward and inviting him to come with us on some of our appointments so that he can prepare for the mission. a man hobbled up to us and grabbed me! he had an open container of liquir i dont know what kind but it was very very strong smelling and he was very intoxicated... he had the alchohol and 2 eggs, he grabbed me and started shouting at me in more broken spanish than mine. it was the weirdest feeling when he grabbed me i could feel the spirit leave me and it was like something dark and terrible came over me, one of the worst feelings i have had since being in the mission i hated it.... well he proceeded to shove the eggs in his mouth and them punch himself in the face to crack them. he started chewing them and then swallowed and spit some of the shell out. he kept yelling "soy loco, tengo un problema con la ley de castidad, yo mastubo" he has a problem with chastity lets just say.... but then he chugged the whole thing of liquir and went to grab for my name badge. i hit is hand away and said no way! haha he told me to give him my pen and 3 article of faith cards... thats all he wanted... but he did so while threatening us with a bottle haha, we gladly ablidged his wants and he wrote jehova, amor on one of them, this means jehova love... he gave it to me and started shouting and grabbed my hand we struggled a bit and finally got away, then my comp and i just started running haha we were with him 10 minutes and it was crazy!!! another fun story is that there are crazy dogs everywhere and we get chased by dogs alot and you get some good excersize... idk its the life of the mission there aint anything better...things with my comp are a little rocky at times and i am working on pacientce for sure, i catch him talking about me with other latins and he thinks i dont understand him but i can, he likes to call me a dirty pig...i dont know why haha but we keep progressing... we are always finding ways to serve, we spent yesterday after church at the home of a street contact stripping her walls and sanding and painting the bambo over again, it was fun... good 6 hours of service... it helps us to grow a stronger love for the people here in Zarumilla...we play a lot of soccer here and im not as bad as i had anticipated, given i dont understand all the shouting and whats going on some of the time i figure that as soon as i get the ball to kick it to a team mate im doing ok.....it is really hot here and we are always procoliting in 40 degree weather. everything here is in metrics and celcious but for you there in the states thats roughly 104 degrees and its not even the peak of summer its supposed to get up to possibly 120!!!! of man we are going to be dying here! haha its hard to stay hydrated when you dont have clean water to drink so when we do have water we are very gratful....dad im sending some pictures home in the mail this week and you should get them soon so you can use them for just about whatever hahathe language is coming along just fine... i can read and write and speak just fine its understanding the people that is taking some getting used to! they all speak really quite and they are all really quick talkers.... but poco a poco...little by little i will get better..i read the book of mormon in spanish in 4 weeks in the mtc... one month!!! it was the coolest experience the translation is so different and you get a totally different perspective on things! i love it...well, i dont really know what else to say, im just about out of time so i will have to go!

i love you all and miss you!

small part of testimony in spanish! for all those who can understand haha